Searching for: "Victor Sebestyen"

Victor Sebestyen's riveting biography of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin—the first major biography in English in nearly two decades—is not only a political examination of one of the most important historical figures of the twentieth century but also a fascinating portrait of Lenin the man.
Brought up in comfort and with a passion for hunting and fishing, chess, and the English classics, Lenin was radicalized after the execution of his brother in 1887. Sebestyen traces the story from Lenin's early years to his long exile in Europe and return to Petrograd in 1917 to lead the first Communist revolution in history. Uniquely, Sebestyen has discovered that throughout Lenin's life his closest...read more

In 1946, Victor Sebestyen creates a taut, panoramic narrative and takes us to meetings that changed the world: to Berlin in July 1945, when Truman tells Stalin that we have successfully tested the bomb; to Ye'nan, China, in January 1946, when General George Marshall tells the Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong that Americans won't send troops to China, assuring that the Communists will attain power; to Delhi, India, in April 1946, when U.K. cabinet members tell Pandit Nehur and Mahatma Gandhi that the British will leave India within a few months, ending two centuries of British imperialism.
Drawing on new archival material and many interviews, Sebestyen analyzes these major postwar...read more

Revolution 1989 by British journalist Victor Sebestyen is a comprehensive and revealing account of those dizzying days that toppled Soviet tyranny and changed the world. For more than 40 years, communism held eight European nations in its iron fist. Yet by the end of 1989, all of these nations had thrown off communism, declared independence, and embarked on the road to...read more